Robert Barron Quotes

We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.

The cross is Jesus going into the very lair of death. He goes to meet head-on that which frightens us the most. And what does He do? He battles it. He engages it. And finally he conquers it.

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages - which helps to explain why so many of modernity's avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel's God, represented the world's resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption - symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos - spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, "I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God," precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.

Christians have no business moping around.

Turn your car into a monastery.

We need to mock false gods publicly.

Catholicism is a matter of the body and the senses as much as it is a matter of the mind, precisely because the Word became flesh.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.

We have laws against polluting our rivers but not against polluting our minds.

The slightest cooperation with God's grace can provoke a massive spiritual change.

I don't think we'll understand Advent correctly until we see it as a preparation for a revolution.

So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness.

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.

Love is not a sentiment or feeling. Love is actively willing the good of the other.

Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.

Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth.

If the Word truly became flesh, then God had not only a mother, but also a grandmother, cousins, great-aunts, and weird uncles. If the Word truly dwelt among us, then he was part of a family that, like most, was fairly dysfunctional, a mix of the good and bad, the saintly and the sinful, the glorious and the not so glorious. And this is such good news for us.

One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down."